She was in every episode but one, and while she doesn't factor into the crime story, her impending death is the event against which everything that happens is weighed.

I was actually mostly on board through the first near-death experience, because it at least had this idiosyncratic, trippy quality ("John Wilkes Booth loved black people") that suggested it was more psychological than metaphysical. But then they did it again, and turned death itself into this perfunctory stopover…

I feel like the whole season walked off a cliff at the end, to be honest. For most of the season it seemed to be a meditation on the notion that every person is at the center of his/her own universe, but by the end it landed on the notion that Kevin Garvey alone is so fucking magically special that he can come back…

I'd argue that the exact opposite thing happened with Fargo season 2, which after seeming like Lou's story for most of the season was ultimately revealed to be Betsy's.

I'm definitely in the minority on this one, but I think season 5 would've been the worst season on which to end Buffy. To me it ends on such a discordant note for a series about an evil-fighting superhero, this notion that caring for the few people to whom you're personally close is more important than giving a shit…

I felt like Brother Justin could've been his breakout role if the show had ever caught on — and if season 2 hadn't turned the character into such a one-dimensional villain, who's suddenly super rapey for no reason other than because he's the Avatar of EEEvil!

Yeah, in retrospect it's pretty clear that season 1 was as good as it was because HBO didn't trust the show's creator to run the writers room that year and handed it over to Ron Moore, who didn't care about the elaborate rules of the "Vectori" and all that shit and just wanted to tell the best story he could.

Carnivàle is a series that tends to be remembered very fondly by those who remember it at all, as a show just a little before its time, a wondrous, audacious serial drama that would've been perfect for the era of binge TV.

That's true in the books, but in the show Stannis indicates that he learned about Jon Arryn's investigations from Ned's letter.

It's rendered slightly less handwavy by the fact that Ned Stark probably told Stannis about Gendry in his letter. So instead of the Red God commanding Melisandre to go get some kid she didn't know anything about, R'hllor probably just answered her prayer for directions to a sacrifice she was already trying to find.

Except that it's been emphasized since season 1 that Lyanna was either abducted or ran off with Rhaegar, and no one else's involvement has ever been hinted at.

That would explain why he doesn't have a penis!

Ugh, I hate the notion that this constitutes any sort of a spoiler after the revelations of the finale. I mean, come on — nothing about that sequence left open the reasonable possibility of any resolution other than this one. And to suggest that it does, it seems to me, is to insist that drama isn't allowed to…

And it's an awful lot of trouble to go to if you don't even wait for the damn thing to land before explaining it. You're supposed to let the guy eat the pie before you tell him his sons are in it! "HI HERE'S A PIE YOUR SONS ARE IN IT LOL!" doesn't have the same poetry.

At this point she may be ruling by dint of "If you don't do what I say, whatever building you're in may suddenly explode in an impossibly gigantic fireball." It's not like the caches of wildfire beneath the city are common knowledge, so for all her subjects know, Cersei can just incinerate buildings at will.

All correct. And part of the handwave, I think, is that the mindwiped Cylons believed that the Final Five were recurring models that fit into their own numbering scheme. So when Baltar's lover explained that she was Number Six of twelve, that was incorrect, but it accurately reflected what she herself assumed.

Yeah — the fact that One did know who the Final Five were, and had in fact engineered the entire Cylon apocalypse in an effort to teach them a lesson. So he had a secret stash of new bodies waiting for the Final Five to wake up in so he could say "Ha ha!"

Selina is a former senator from Maryland whose party supports things like abortion rights and clean jobs and is shocked to be on the NRA's good side for once, and one of her core constituencies is "educated gays." O'Brien is a senator from Arizona who's described as a member of the "pro-Caucasian caucus" and is…

I guess, but for a show that's so good at exploring the confounding nuances of politics, it seems like a lot of nuances are getting lost here. Wouldn't James become a pariah among the Tastycrats for conspiring with the Fingerlicans against his own party's nominee? Wouldn't the Speaker and the other conspirators in the…

Well, the full text is ". . . no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President." I suppose James could at least make the argument that it doesn't apply to a term in which no one is ever elected president.